Edward G. Acheson accidentally discovers silicon carbide,…

Seattle University, a private Jesuit university in Seattle, Washington, is established as the Immaculate Conception schoo in 1891, when Adrian Sweere, S.J., takes over a small parish near downtown Seattle at Broadway and Madison.

At first, the school is named after the surrounding Immaculate Conception parish and oes not offer higher education.

SU is today the largest independent university in the Northwest United States, with over seventy-five hundred students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs within eight schools.

The Auckland University Students' Association is founded in New Zealand in 1891.

The constitution of the AUSA centers the organiszation around student advocacy and the provision of welfare services.

Lenin scores first in his class and passes law examinations at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1891.

He moves to Samsara to practice law.

Russia accelerates industrialism and eastern expansion, and begins to build the TransSiberian railway in 1891.

Ilya Repin's Zaporozhian Cossacks is perhaps his best-known painting.

The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey, in full, depicts a supposedly historical tableau, set in 1676, and based on the legend of Cossacks sending a reply to an ultimatum of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed IV.

The original reply, if it ever existed, has not survived.

According to the story, the Zaporozhian Cossacks (from "beyond the rapids", Ukrainian: za porohamy), inhabiting the lands around the lower Dnieper River in Ukraine, had defeated Ottoman Empire forces in battle.

However, Mehmed demanded that the Cossacks submit to Ottoman rule.

The Cossacks, led by Ivan Sirko, replied in an uncharacteristic manner: they wrote a letter, replete with insults and profanities

The painting exhibits the Cossacks' pleasure at striving to come up with ever more base vulgarities.

During Repin's time, the Cossacks enjoy great popular sympathy.

Repin also admires them.

Alexander III buys the painting for thirty-five thousand rubles, at this time the greatest sum ever paid for a Russian painting.

The canvas has been exhibited ever since in the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Skansen is established as the world's first open-air museum by Artur Hazelius, on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1891.

The nineteenth century has been a period of great change throughout Europe, and Sweden is no exception.

Its rural way of life is rapidly giving way to an industrialized society and many fear that the country's many traditional customs and occupations might be lost to history.

Hazelius, who had previously founded the Nordic Museum on the island of Djurgården near the center of Stockholm, had been inspired by the open-air museum, founded by King Oscar II in Kristiania in 1881, when he created his open-air museum on the hill that dominates the island.

Skansen will become the model for other early open-air museums in Scandinavia and later ones elsewhere.

Skansen is originally a part of the Nordic Museum, but will become an independent organization in 1963.

The objects within the Skansen buildings will remain the property of the Nordic Museum.

After extensive traveling, Hazelius had bought around one hundred and fifty houses from all over the country (as well as one structure from Telemark in Norway) and had had them shipped piece by piece to the museum, where they have been rebuilt to provide a unique picture of traditional Sweden.

Only three of the buildings in the museum are not original, and had been painstakingly copied from examples he had found.

All of the buildings are open to visitors and show the full range of Swedish life from manor houses to  farmhouses.

Britain begins to fear the growing power of collectivist-militarist Germany and her demands on world trade and Empire.

Hermann von Helmholtz becomes the first director of the Physico-Technical Institute in Berlin in 1891.

The German Social Democratic party upholds revolutionary Marxism through the Erfurt program, much of it authored by Karl Kautsky.

Germany begins paying old age pensions on January 1, 1891, as a consequence of Otto von Bismarck's social legislation, the Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill in 1889.

The Old Age Pension program, financed by a tax on workers, is originally designed to provide a pension annuity for workers who reached the age of seventy years, though this will be lowered to sixty-five years in 1916.

It will sometimes be claimed that at the time life expectancy for the average Prussian was forty-five years; in fact, this figure is due to the very high infant mortality and high maternal death rate from childbirth of this era.

An adult entering into insurance under the scheme would in fact on average live to seventy years of age, a figure used in the actuarial assumptions included in the legislation.